Emily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
iluvroadrunner6) wrote2014-07-24 01:31 pm
iluvroadrunner6) wrote2014-07-24 01:31 pm
teen wolf/torchwood } { we're entwined and hopeless, and the world turns upside down
Title: we're entwined and hopeless, and the world turns upside down
Fandom: Teen Wolf/Torchwood
Prompt: Bathroom though Derek's bathroom probably isn't this nice and not all of the fic is set in it, it just sort of exploded.
Rating: PG-13
Word or Line count: 2,628 words
Summary: In which meeting Captain Jack Harkness explains so much about Peter Hale. AKA - Emily uses a fixed point in time and space to save the betas of 3A.
Warnings: Crack. So much crack. Also liberal abuse of the Teen Wolf/Torchwood timelines.
Once upon a time, a fixed point in time and space fell in love with a Hale alpha. They were happy, for a time, and they had a life together, for a time, but in the end, things end the way they always do when it comes to Jack. Everything he touches turns to ash eventually. Sometimes it’s just a little more literal than others.
In the end, his daughter was dead, his son was broken beyond repair, and his grandchildren were scattered, two of them in a car to New York as fast as the engine would carry them and the last one tucked into his coat in the backseat of his, terrified out of her mind and sobbing for her mother. This disaster isn’t as directly his fault as most of the others – he didn’t have a hand in this as much as he could have – but it’s yet another family he’s failed to protect.
So he saves the piece of them he can, vows to do better this time around, and hopes that they don’t hate him too much for it later.
***
Jack’s timing could have been better, he’ll admit. Showing up at the last possible minute usually comes with a side of saving the day, not watching as two moon-rabid werewolves go running off into the distance to terrorize a small town, but at least they managed to get out of it all with no one getting hurt.
Aside from Derek, anyway.
They get back to the loft and he can feel Derek watching him from the pillar as he places Cora gently down on the bed he indicated. It’s sitting in the middle of the open area of the loft, and he can tell from the way she curls into the comforter, it’s probably Derek’s. Derek’s two betas (Scott and Isaac, he will learn eventually) are helping Boyd upstairs and he turns to focus on Derek, who looks beat to hell and in need of a shower and a good night’s sleep, in that order.
“You should clean up.”
“Is that an order, Captain?” The title comes with a tired sort of sarcasm, and Jack flashes him a look, rolling his shoulders to get his coat off before draping it over the prone body on the bed. Cora curls into it on instinct as well, fingers fisting the material as she pulls it around her, almost like a protective family force field. Derek flashes him one right back, before rubbing at his eyes. “Someone needs to watch them.”
“I’ll stay. You rest.” Derek’s jaw sets and Jack sighs, taking him by the shoulders and leading him towards the bathroom. Derek knows better than to ask how he knows exactly where it is. “At least get rid of the blood. Your sister and your beta don’t need to have you rubbing the damage they caused in their face.”
The slump of Derek’s shoulders means that Derek knows he’s right, but there’s still a bit of resistance to the nudge, as though there was something that he’s not quite happy with in the given situation, but he’s not fighting him as much as he could be. That has to be worth something.
“Did you have her the entire time?”
Jack pauses for a moment, massaging a hand into his shoulder as they walked. It’s meant to be soothing. It usually was but a lot has happened since the last time they saw each other. Still, he can feel a small bit of the resistance fading as they make their way into the bathroom and he sits Derek down on the edge of the tub. Blood loss isn’t easy, even for someone who heals, and he can hear how tired he is. Big hands he got more from his father brace the edge of the tub and he balances his weight easily. That at least is a good sign.
“I did.”
Derek’s eyes flash up, a bit of anger in them but not as much as it could be. He already has the answer to a lot of it. He can put together the reasons why without trying too hard. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“You didn’t need to know.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“It had to do with my granddaughter’s safety – she was eleven years-old, it was precisely my decision to make.”
“We thought she was dead!” Derek’s energy is starting to return and he’s on his feet, but it’s more anger than anything else. “I thought she was dead. I thought that I – ”
Jack’s hands come up to brace his shoulders again, his grip firm, steady. “You didn’t kill them.” He knows the guilt well, the way that the mistakes you made can amplify until they’re too much to handle and he knows that it’s probably too late for him to stop Derek from letting it swallow him whole, but if he and Cora are together now, maybe she can find a way to drag him back. “You didn’t kill her. You can be happy about that.”
He doesn’t know when it started that Derek needed to be given permission to be happy about things, but he isn’t all that surprised either. There’s a moment, a brief moment where Derek’s head tips forward, bringing his forehead to rest against Jack’s shoulder. His free hand moves to the back of his neck, letting Derek take in the scent of family, take whatever comfort he can get from it. For someone who hasn’t had family in so long, Jack knows it means so much more when you manage to find them again.
“You can trust her.”
Cora, that is. He can’t necessarily trust Jack, but he knows on some level, Derek already knew that.
After a moment he pulls back, ready to give Derek his privacy to get clean. As he turns his back on his grandson, he hears him speak softly one last time. “Peter knows you’re here.”
There’s a long pause in the doorway at that, before he sighs softly, letting it go. “Well. This should be fun.”
***
Derek wakes up the next morning after having fallen asleep on the couch, the exhaustion creeping in and sneaking up on him, to find Jack gone. He’s angry, but not necessarily surprised – Jack had a habit of disappearing whenever he wanted. However, the alarm was on, and the curled up bundle on the bed hadn’t been disturbed save for one thing.
There was a blond one lying next to her.
Derek probably should thank Jack for that, but he never does. He finds him later, meaning to, but gets distracted when he walks in with Peter standing over him, claws bloody, and Jack lying prone on the floor. His eyes have that glassy sort of look he usually gets when he’s dead, even if it is only briefly. There are deep claw marks shoved into his sides, and Peter is looking incredibly pleased with himself.
“Really?” Derek’s eyebrows raise along with the question, oddly calm for someone who had just found their grandfather dead. It would probably be better if their grandfather wasn’t Jack Harkness. Peter glances at him for a moment, before giving an easy sort of shrug.
“Dear old dad and I were just catching up. We had a bit of unfinished business to sort out.”
“I can see that.” Derek crosses his arms in front of his chest, leaning in the doorframe. “He saved Erica.”
“How generous of him.” His tone indicates that Peter doesn’t think it’s very generous at all. His head tips to the side curiously, studying the prone body in front of him as though it was going to offer up some kind of insight. “If only he was so generous with his own family.”
“He saved Cora.”
“He could have saved his daughter. He could have saved all of us.” The look in Peter’s eyes was one Derek had seen before, a kind of jarring certainty that comes when he’s past the point of his mind being changed. “Might be nice if he could put forth just a little more effort. Just once.”
Derek is quiet, trying to determine a response to that when a sudden gasp from the man on the floor draws the attention of both men to the blood pool on the floor. Jack glances down at himself for a moment, taking stock of the situation before looking up at the two men standing in front of him.
“Feel better?” There’s an edge of sarcasm there and Peter just grins down at him, smug and feral all at the same time.
“For now.”
***
“He’s helping us.”
“Helping us?”
Jack isn’t sure if he’s incredibly endeared by Stiles, or if he just wants to smack him in the face and tell him to sit down and shut up. The kid asks a lot of questions, and in some ways questioning is good. Questioning gets you in doors your probably shouldn’t go down to things you really do need to learn – at least most of the time. Right now, is that time where questioning is just getting him on everyone’s last nerve.
“I’m sorry, what has he done that’s been helpful exactly, other than being cryptic and vague and showing up unexplainably out of nowhere?” Stiles holds his hands out next to him in a please explain kind of gesture.
“He saved my life?” Erica raises a hand and gives a bit of a wave. “That’s good enough for me.”
“Oh, so really, all it takes is saving one beta and we trust someone now? What happened to you Hales and your trust issues?”
“We’ve known Jack a lot longer than we’ve known you, Stiles,” Derek replies evenly. “And we need all the help we can get.”
“Personally, I think we need to be a little more selective about where we get our help. Why should we trust this guy over Allison and her dad?”
“Because of the three of us, I’m not the one related to a now-dead raging psychopath who killed their family?” Jack offers helpfully. “Oh, and I didn’t try to viciously hunt down most of the people in this room at the beginning of the summer. Is that helpful or do you need to see more of my credentials?”
“I just want to know who you are, dude.”
“He’s our grandfather.” The words come out of Cora’s mouth before Jack can respond, and he can see Derek tense across the room as the wheels in Stiles’s head start spinning. His mouth gapes for a moment, and his brow knits in confusion before he finally speaks.
“No, you can’t be.” He jerks his head towards where Peter is sitting, stretched out on the couch with his eyes closed, and then turns back to Jack again. “No, you can’t be – you’re his —that doesn’t make any – ” There’s a long beat and his face relaxes slightly. “Well, actually that explains a lot. But you can’t be more than what? Forty?”
“Oh. I haven’t gotten a forty in decades,” Jack smirks a bit, almost as though Stiles just delivered him a compliment. “Keep talking, sailor.”
Stiles stares at him for a long moment. “How old are you exactly? Actually, more importantly, what are you?”
“Older than you want to know, trust me,” Jack sighs. “And you don’t really want to know for the ‘what’ either.”
Stiles just stares at him for a moment, before shaking his head. “Well, great. Now I know where that comes from.” He runs a hand over his face, scrubbing it softly, before turning back to the rest of the group. “Okay. So we have Old Guy. How does that help us stop the alpha pack? Do you have a plan, Old Guy?”
“Actually,” Boyd says softly, before lifting a pair of jumper cables. “We do.”
***
The plan doesn’t go accordingly. No one is really surprised at this point. However when the pack decides they want to prove a point, they try to pick the target they thought would do the most damage. The one that has happened to piss them off the most. They choose Jack, and Derek hopes he can see the apology on his face as he sinks down on his claws, sharp daggers heading right for the vital organs.
It’s not his first time being eviscerated by a werewolf. Probably won’t be his last, either. It is, however, the first time that it’s come courtesy of Derek, and while he knows, consciously, that it’s not the sort of thing that will last – Jack will come back, just like he always does – it still hits him a lot harder than he expects it to.
In the end, he’s still killed someone. That’s not something you can really take back.
Stiles and Cora stumble in through the door, Stiles plowing through the water a little faster than his sister. She knows just as well as Derek does that Jack doesn’t stay dead for long, even from wounds like that. Stiles, however, is new to this particular program.
“Is that Jack?” Stiles glances around to each of them, Boyd and Erica waiting impatiently, Isaac looking distraught and Derek trying to be as impassive as possible.
“Kali made Derek do it.” Isaac fills in the blanks while Cora kneels in the water next to Jack, brushing a hand over his forehead gently while she waits. “She held his claws and the twins dropped him on them.”
“What? Is he - ?” Stiles’s voice cuts off as it sinks in, and he glances to Derek with a frown. “Dude, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” That question seems to snap him into moving, crossing the water to Cora’s side and gesturing for Boyd to help him. “Help me get him on the platform.”
“You just killed your grandfather.” Stiles just stares at him like he’s lost his mind, or just found out that Derek is some kind of robot. “At least, according to you, because I’m still not really sure how that works. And you’re what, just going to move the body like it’s nothing?”
“I’m fine, Stiles.” He’s not. He’s so far from fine, but he doesn’t want to deal with that now. “Either help or shut up.”
Stiles helps. He doesn’t necessarily shut up, but he helps. He at least manages to stay quiet until Jack is resting on the platform they’d used to keep themselves above the electrified water, before finally speaking up again.
“I just don’t see how you can be so – ”
Jack spasms back to life with a deep breath hand reaching out to find Derek’s shoulder, using it to steady himself. It happens so suddenly that Stiles stumbles back several feet landing in the water with a hard splash. He can even hear Isaac stumbling back behind him. Boyd and Erica look unbothered by it, however, and it leads Derek to think that they may have seen something like this before. At the moment, he can’t really bother caring.
Jack turns to him, and flashes him a wide grin. “Did it work?”
The bait and switch. It was supposed to be Boyd they wanted, a member of Derek’s pack to force his choice, but Jack managed to figure out a plan that meant everyone lives. It would have just been nice if he clued Derek in on it.
“I am never doing that again.”
“God, I hope not.” Jack turns his eyes towards the teenage boy who’s still sitting in the water, probably getting soaked and just staring at Jack with wide, almost frightened eyes. Derek knows better, however. Stiles isn’t really scared of anything. “You alright there, Stiles?”
Stiles just blinks for a moment.
“This explains so much about Peter.”
Fandom: Teen Wolf/Torchwood
Prompt: Bathroom though Derek's bathroom probably isn't this nice and not all of the fic is set in it, it just sort of exploded.
Rating: PG-13
Word or Line count: 2,628 words
Summary: In which meeting Captain Jack Harkness explains so much about Peter Hale. AKA - Emily uses a fixed point in time and space to save the betas of 3A.
Warnings: Crack. So much crack. Also liberal abuse of the Teen Wolf/Torchwood timelines.
Once upon a time, a fixed point in time and space fell in love with a Hale alpha. They were happy, for a time, and they had a life together, for a time, but in the end, things end the way they always do when it comes to Jack. Everything he touches turns to ash eventually. Sometimes it’s just a little more literal than others.
In the end, his daughter was dead, his son was broken beyond repair, and his grandchildren were scattered, two of them in a car to New York as fast as the engine would carry them and the last one tucked into his coat in the backseat of his, terrified out of her mind and sobbing for her mother. This disaster isn’t as directly his fault as most of the others – he didn’t have a hand in this as much as he could have – but it’s yet another family he’s failed to protect.
So he saves the piece of them he can, vows to do better this time around, and hopes that they don’t hate him too much for it later.
***
Jack’s timing could have been better, he’ll admit. Showing up at the last possible minute usually comes with a side of saving the day, not watching as two moon-rabid werewolves go running off into the distance to terrorize a small town, but at least they managed to get out of it all with no one getting hurt.
Aside from Derek, anyway.
They get back to the loft and he can feel Derek watching him from the pillar as he places Cora gently down on the bed he indicated. It’s sitting in the middle of the open area of the loft, and he can tell from the way she curls into the comforter, it’s probably Derek’s. Derek’s two betas (Scott and Isaac, he will learn eventually) are helping Boyd upstairs and he turns to focus on Derek, who looks beat to hell and in need of a shower and a good night’s sleep, in that order.
“You should clean up.”
“Is that an order, Captain?” The title comes with a tired sort of sarcasm, and Jack flashes him a look, rolling his shoulders to get his coat off before draping it over the prone body on the bed. Cora curls into it on instinct as well, fingers fisting the material as she pulls it around her, almost like a protective family force field. Derek flashes him one right back, before rubbing at his eyes. “Someone needs to watch them.”
“I’ll stay. You rest.” Derek’s jaw sets and Jack sighs, taking him by the shoulders and leading him towards the bathroom. Derek knows better than to ask how he knows exactly where it is. “At least get rid of the blood. Your sister and your beta don’t need to have you rubbing the damage they caused in their face.”
The slump of Derek’s shoulders means that Derek knows he’s right, but there’s still a bit of resistance to the nudge, as though there was something that he’s not quite happy with in the given situation, but he’s not fighting him as much as he could be. That has to be worth something.
“Did you have her the entire time?”
Jack pauses for a moment, massaging a hand into his shoulder as they walked. It’s meant to be soothing. It usually was but a lot has happened since the last time they saw each other. Still, he can feel a small bit of the resistance fading as they make their way into the bathroom and he sits Derek down on the edge of the tub. Blood loss isn’t easy, even for someone who heals, and he can hear how tired he is. Big hands he got more from his father brace the edge of the tub and he balances his weight easily. That at least is a good sign.
“I did.”
Derek’s eyes flash up, a bit of anger in them but not as much as it could be. He already has the answer to a lot of it. He can put together the reasons why without trying too hard. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“You didn’t need to know.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“It had to do with my granddaughter’s safety – she was eleven years-old, it was precisely my decision to make.”
“We thought she was dead!” Derek’s energy is starting to return and he’s on his feet, but it’s more anger than anything else. “I thought she was dead. I thought that I – ”
Jack’s hands come up to brace his shoulders again, his grip firm, steady. “You didn’t kill them.” He knows the guilt well, the way that the mistakes you made can amplify until they’re too much to handle and he knows that it’s probably too late for him to stop Derek from letting it swallow him whole, but if he and Cora are together now, maybe she can find a way to drag him back. “You didn’t kill her. You can be happy about that.”
He doesn’t know when it started that Derek needed to be given permission to be happy about things, but he isn’t all that surprised either. There’s a moment, a brief moment where Derek’s head tips forward, bringing his forehead to rest against Jack’s shoulder. His free hand moves to the back of his neck, letting Derek take in the scent of family, take whatever comfort he can get from it. For someone who hasn’t had family in so long, Jack knows it means so much more when you manage to find them again.
“You can trust her.”
Cora, that is. He can’t necessarily trust Jack, but he knows on some level, Derek already knew that.
After a moment he pulls back, ready to give Derek his privacy to get clean. As he turns his back on his grandson, he hears him speak softly one last time. “Peter knows you’re here.”
There’s a long pause in the doorway at that, before he sighs softly, letting it go. “Well. This should be fun.”
***
Derek wakes up the next morning after having fallen asleep on the couch, the exhaustion creeping in and sneaking up on him, to find Jack gone. He’s angry, but not necessarily surprised – Jack had a habit of disappearing whenever he wanted. However, the alarm was on, and the curled up bundle on the bed hadn’t been disturbed save for one thing.
There was a blond one lying next to her.
Derek probably should thank Jack for that, but he never does. He finds him later, meaning to, but gets distracted when he walks in with Peter standing over him, claws bloody, and Jack lying prone on the floor. His eyes have that glassy sort of look he usually gets when he’s dead, even if it is only briefly. There are deep claw marks shoved into his sides, and Peter is looking incredibly pleased with himself.
“Really?” Derek’s eyebrows raise along with the question, oddly calm for someone who had just found their grandfather dead. It would probably be better if their grandfather wasn’t Jack Harkness. Peter glances at him for a moment, before giving an easy sort of shrug.
“Dear old dad and I were just catching up. We had a bit of unfinished business to sort out.”
“I can see that.” Derek crosses his arms in front of his chest, leaning in the doorframe. “He saved Erica.”
“How generous of him.” His tone indicates that Peter doesn’t think it’s very generous at all. His head tips to the side curiously, studying the prone body in front of him as though it was going to offer up some kind of insight. “If only he was so generous with his own family.”
“He saved Cora.”
“He could have saved his daughter. He could have saved all of us.” The look in Peter’s eyes was one Derek had seen before, a kind of jarring certainty that comes when he’s past the point of his mind being changed. “Might be nice if he could put forth just a little more effort. Just once.”
Derek is quiet, trying to determine a response to that when a sudden gasp from the man on the floor draws the attention of both men to the blood pool on the floor. Jack glances down at himself for a moment, taking stock of the situation before looking up at the two men standing in front of him.
“Feel better?” There’s an edge of sarcasm there and Peter just grins down at him, smug and feral all at the same time.
“For now.”
***
“He’s helping us.”
“Helping us?”
Jack isn’t sure if he’s incredibly endeared by Stiles, or if he just wants to smack him in the face and tell him to sit down and shut up. The kid asks a lot of questions, and in some ways questioning is good. Questioning gets you in doors your probably shouldn’t go down to things you really do need to learn – at least most of the time. Right now, is that time where questioning is just getting him on everyone’s last nerve.
“I’m sorry, what has he done that’s been helpful exactly, other than being cryptic and vague and showing up unexplainably out of nowhere?” Stiles holds his hands out next to him in a please explain kind of gesture.
“He saved my life?” Erica raises a hand and gives a bit of a wave. “That’s good enough for me.”
“Oh, so really, all it takes is saving one beta and we trust someone now? What happened to you Hales and your trust issues?”
“We’ve known Jack a lot longer than we’ve known you, Stiles,” Derek replies evenly. “And we need all the help we can get.”
“Personally, I think we need to be a little more selective about where we get our help. Why should we trust this guy over Allison and her dad?”
“Because of the three of us, I’m not the one related to a now-dead raging psychopath who killed their family?” Jack offers helpfully. “Oh, and I didn’t try to viciously hunt down most of the people in this room at the beginning of the summer. Is that helpful or do you need to see more of my credentials?”
“I just want to know who you are, dude.”
“He’s our grandfather.” The words come out of Cora’s mouth before Jack can respond, and he can see Derek tense across the room as the wheels in Stiles’s head start spinning. His mouth gapes for a moment, and his brow knits in confusion before he finally speaks.
“No, you can’t be.” He jerks his head towards where Peter is sitting, stretched out on the couch with his eyes closed, and then turns back to Jack again. “No, you can’t be – you’re his —that doesn’t make any – ” There’s a long beat and his face relaxes slightly. “Well, actually that explains a lot. But you can’t be more than what? Forty?”
“Oh. I haven’t gotten a forty in decades,” Jack smirks a bit, almost as though Stiles just delivered him a compliment. “Keep talking, sailor.”
Stiles stares at him for a long moment. “How old are you exactly? Actually, more importantly, what are you?”
“Older than you want to know, trust me,” Jack sighs. “And you don’t really want to know for the ‘what’ either.”
Stiles just stares at him for a moment, before shaking his head. “Well, great. Now I know where that comes from.” He runs a hand over his face, scrubbing it softly, before turning back to the rest of the group. “Okay. So we have Old Guy. How does that help us stop the alpha pack? Do you have a plan, Old Guy?”
“Actually,” Boyd says softly, before lifting a pair of jumper cables. “We do.”
***
The plan doesn’t go accordingly. No one is really surprised at this point. However when the pack decides they want to prove a point, they try to pick the target they thought would do the most damage. The one that has happened to piss them off the most. They choose Jack, and Derek hopes he can see the apology on his face as he sinks down on his claws, sharp daggers heading right for the vital organs.
It’s not his first time being eviscerated by a werewolf. Probably won’t be his last, either. It is, however, the first time that it’s come courtesy of Derek, and while he knows, consciously, that it’s not the sort of thing that will last – Jack will come back, just like he always does – it still hits him a lot harder than he expects it to.
In the end, he’s still killed someone. That’s not something you can really take back.
Stiles and Cora stumble in through the door, Stiles plowing through the water a little faster than his sister. She knows just as well as Derek does that Jack doesn’t stay dead for long, even from wounds like that. Stiles, however, is new to this particular program.
“Is that Jack?” Stiles glances around to each of them, Boyd and Erica waiting impatiently, Isaac looking distraught and Derek trying to be as impassive as possible.
“Kali made Derek do it.” Isaac fills in the blanks while Cora kneels in the water next to Jack, brushing a hand over his forehead gently while she waits. “She held his claws and the twins dropped him on them.”
“What? Is he - ?” Stiles’s voice cuts off as it sinks in, and he glances to Derek with a frown. “Dude, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” That question seems to snap him into moving, crossing the water to Cora’s side and gesturing for Boyd to help him. “Help me get him on the platform.”
“You just killed your grandfather.” Stiles just stares at him like he’s lost his mind, or just found out that Derek is some kind of robot. “At least, according to you, because I’m still not really sure how that works. And you’re what, just going to move the body like it’s nothing?”
“I’m fine, Stiles.” He’s not. He’s so far from fine, but he doesn’t want to deal with that now. “Either help or shut up.”
Stiles helps. He doesn’t necessarily shut up, but he helps. He at least manages to stay quiet until Jack is resting on the platform they’d used to keep themselves above the electrified water, before finally speaking up again.
“I just don’t see how you can be so – ”
Jack spasms back to life with a deep breath hand reaching out to find Derek’s shoulder, using it to steady himself. It happens so suddenly that Stiles stumbles back several feet landing in the water with a hard splash. He can even hear Isaac stumbling back behind him. Boyd and Erica look unbothered by it, however, and it leads Derek to think that they may have seen something like this before. At the moment, he can’t really bother caring.
Jack turns to him, and flashes him a wide grin. “Did it work?”
The bait and switch. It was supposed to be Boyd they wanted, a member of Derek’s pack to force his choice, but Jack managed to figure out a plan that meant everyone lives. It would have just been nice if he clued Derek in on it.
“I am never doing that again.”
“God, I hope not.” Jack turns his eyes towards the teenage boy who’s still sitting in the water, probably getting soaked and just staring at Jack with wide, almost frightened eyes. Derek knows better, however. Stiles isn’t really scared of anything. “You alright there, Stiles?”
Stiles just blinks for a moment.
“This explains so much about Peter.”